Rapid Shift

Housing For All: A Real Solution for America’s Housing Crisis

Kaniela Ing, Democrat for Congress (HI-01). Father, state legislator, proud progressive. I fight for working families, because I come from one. Jul 24, 2018 on Medium.com

Generations ago, Americans were promised dignified healthcare, retirement, and housing among other basic rights. Congress boldly enacted Medicare and Social Security, socialized programs that remain incredibly popular today, but its approach to universal housing never passed public muster. While the New Deal established a framework for universal housing, its mandate was never fulfilled.

Instead, Congress patched up our systemically racist housing policy with stigmatized means testing, underfunded vouchers, and high-barrier mortgage subsidies. These half-measures actually widened inequality and continued segregation into the 21st century. Congress then handed the keys to Big Banks who mowed over public lenders and drove our economy to the brink of collapse. Working people spent trillions to bail out the world’s richest banks, while their executives escaped on golden parachutes. They ripped us off.

The median cost for a single family home in Honolulu is now $795,000, which means residents need to make $200,000 a year to afford an average home in my district. Hawaii is short over 60,000 homes. Most of my classmates have already moved out of state, and I’m worried about my son’s future here. Our generation is not set up to succeed like our parents were.

It’s not just Hawaii. For every 100 low-income families in America, there are just 35 affordable homes. Only one in four low-income families eligible for assistance receives any. Those who live in existing public housing are underfunded, treated as an afterthought, and often evicted from their homes to make way for luxury “redevelopment”. More than 12 million unassisted low-income renters pay over half of their income for housing, and literally nowhere in America can a minimum wage worker afford basic rent.

Yet politicians in both parties continue to rely on the same institutions that created our housing crisis to fix it. People I’ve met throughout this campaign are tired of “affordable housing” proposals that are ghost-written by luxury developers and corporate donors. We are building for speculative profit rather than human need. We need a paradigm shift. America needs Housing For All.

Recognizing housing as a human right will make it possible for each person to realize his or her potential and for our society to thrive and prosper. Like the minimum wage, Housing For All would provide a floor, not a ceiling, for every citizen. People would still be able to strive for more, but every resident would have a place to strive from.

In Sweden, a country of 8 million people, public developers built over 1 million homes in just ten years. In Vienna, 60 percent residents now live in social houses. Even Vienna’s wealthy prefer the quality of life that its public housing provides, which translates to vibrant, integrated, mixed-income communities. In Singapore, most residents spend only 23 percent of their incomes for brand new three-bedroom units. Meanwhile, I, like many of my peers, pay over 40 percent of my income for a single bedroom apartment. America’s housing status-quo is antiquated, inefficient, and immoral.

Social Housing has shown to be so desirable that even the wealthy want to live in them.

Nascent, innovative organizations like People’s Policy Project and People’s Action, along with some of our nation’s most forward thinking economists, have helped our campaign outline the boldest, most visionary, Housing for All proposal in America. Our goals are simple: (1) build 10 million social houses over the next 10 years; (2) keep rent under control; and, (3) provide a home for every American.

Congress should invest heavily in at-cost construction of social housing in high-need areas like Hawaii, while providing federal loans with 0% down payments everywhere. State and local governments or nonprofit developers would administer the programs, mandated by Congress and funded through a fully replenished National Housing Trust Fund.

Housing for All would also include provisions for modern rent stabilization, race and class integration, and a national Tenants Bill of Rights. These policies would protect renters from unjust evictions, promote diverse communities, and ensure a majority of rental housing costs less than 30% of the median income in that area. Housing for All could revamp federal affordable housing regulations to keep affordable units affordable indefinitely, not just 10 or 20 years. On the demand side, Housing for All could place additional luxury taxes on vacant units and non-owner occupied investment properties worth over $2 million. After all, a society with empty mansions and unsheltered people is an unjust one.

America has enough wealth to live up to its word and provide every resident with decent, dignified housing. Scarcity did not occur naturally; it was a political choice. Luxury developers, their corporate tenants, and price-gouging landlords have been buying out our politicians for decades. But when working people come together and demand change, Congress will be forced to act. Housing for All is possible, but only if we lead with the same conviction that brought forth the New Deal and deliver on America’s promise from generations ago.

Two-year-old Samson Neuburger gets a hand placing his stone before the altar at the new temporary home of Arlington Presbyterian Church in June 2016. The church sold its land to a developer to build affordable housing in Arlington. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

Driving around her hometown of Alexandria, Va., on a bright and sunny morning last week, McIlvaine slowed the car at white spire after white spire. She turned her head, cocked an eyebrow and scrutinized each red-brick square on its grassy plot.

“I sort of go past everything and say, ‘That could be affordable housing,’ ” McIlvaine said. “I go past a Scottish Rite temple and say, ‘Do they really need all that land?’ Once you start looking, you can’t stop — there are opportunities everywhere.”

Over the past five years, McIlvaine has proved her own maxim. In her work for the city of Alexandria, where she serves as director of housing, she has shepherded four churches through selling or leasing all or part of their land and converting it to space for affordable housing. At least two more churches are “in the pipeline,” McIlvaine said.

And it’s not just Alexandria. Churches across the District, Maryland and Virginia are turning their properties into living space for low-income residents. David Bowers, vice president of the nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners, said his organization has helped seven houses of worship in the Baltimore-Washington corridor do this in the past 12 years.

Enterprise is working with roughly two dozen more churches.

Bowers said the Mid-Atlantic region has become a national leader in this arena, pioneering a faith-based solution to the dearth of affordable housing that advocates across the country are beginning to imitate. He and others at Enterprise, which formed its Faith-Based Development Initiative specifically to encourage this tactic in 2006, hope to bring the strategy to major cities across the nation.

Proponents say churches are ideally suited to build affordable housing. Houses of worship often sit on valuable land but are less concerned with cutting the best deal possible, thus minimizing costs borne by nonprofit developers. And, for churches faced with shrinking congregations and underutilized buildings, installing affordable units offers a fresh infusion of cash and a better way to serve the community, backers say.

“In Matthew 25, we are called to feed the hungry, clothe the naked,” the Rev. Sam Marullo, a former professor at the District’s Wesley Theological Seminary, said at a forum on faith and affordable housing in the District last month. “I would add into that Matthew 25 quote, ‘Build housing for those that need housing.’ ”

A tale of two crises

When McIlvaine walked through the door of Alexandria’s Office of Housing in 2006, no one there was thinking about churches.

But she couldn’t get them off her mind. McIlvaine had just completed a stint at the Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing (APAH), where she had launched First Baptist Church of Clarendon on its long and contentious — but ultimately successful — fight to build affordable units on its land. The church was one of the first in the area to try its hand at affordable housing, and McIlvaine wanted to keep a good thing going.

She felt churches were the future. The faith groups “just have a natural heart for it,” she said.

“When we started about 12 years ago, there were a number of folks who were dubious, who would say: ‘These are not developers. Why would we work with a house of worship?’ ” Bowers said.

The area’s affordable-housing crisis deepened as low-income people poured into the region while low-income units disappeared. Alexandria offers a typical example: Between 2000 and 2017, upscale redevelopment projects and rising rents in the city slashed by 90 percent the quantity of apartments affordable to those who earn roughly 50 percent of the area’s median income.

At the same time, churches were facing a crisis of their own. Over the past 60 years, church attendance in the northeast sector of the country has declined. The problem may worsen in years to come: A 2015 study by the Pew Research Center found that religious disaffection is soaring among Americans under 30.

The intersection of these two trends did a lot to quell doubt and make religious leaders and housing advocates more willing to risk a new plan, Bowers said.

“A lot of these faith communities are in crisis. They had their peak attendance in the 1960s, so they have these overbuilt facilities and yet they want to be good stewards of these places they’ve inherited,” said Nina Janopaul, the president of APAH. “So they see this as a win-win — they can right-size their facilities to the size of their congregation and serve their mission at the same time.”

In 2013, seven years after McIlvaine’s arrival, Alexandria issued its Housing Master Plan. For the first time in city history, the plan specifically suggested places of worship as a source of affordable housing.

A seven-step program

Today, the church-to-affordable-housing pathway is well established in the DMV.

Most houses of worship follow the same script, selling their land outright to a nonprofit developer or signing on to a ground lease, which allows the developer to build and operate the affordable-housing units while the church retains ownership of the land. The units built are usually designated for people who make 40 to 60 percent of the area’s median income.

The construction fee is driven down by low-income-housing tax credits, which the government grants to affordable-housing investments. Still, each unit can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build. This means churches and their nonprofit developer partners often face a “gap” in the financing, as McIlvaine calls it — and that’s where the city steps in.

In each of the church projects McIlvaine has undertaken, the city of Alexandria contributed a long-term loan often amounting to several million dollars. McIlvaine said the Office of Housing typically receives a yearly budget of between $4 million and $6 million that it can dedicate to affordable-housing initiatives.

Bowers said local governments throughout the region are starting to follow in Alexandria’s footsteps and recognize houses of worship as “potential partners” in the effort to create more affordable housing. So are state officials further afield — Bowers said he took a call a few years ago from New York City’s housing department, which wanted to learn how it could better work with the “faith community” in the five boroughs. Enterprise, which has offices in San Francisco and Denver, is also hoping to kick-start projects in those places.

“So we are starting to see more of it bubble up in some key places around the country,” Bowers said. “We are intentionally looking to bring it to a number of cities.”

The sale and construction process is long and taxing, typically requiring between five and seven years to complete, McIlvaine said. To ease the way for would-be builders, Janopaul has developed a seven-step program to guide churches through the construction of affordable units. The steps include “discernment” — during which the church evaluates whether it possesses the necessary resources and vision — as well as team building, a feasibility study, construction and, finally, celebration.

Janopaul said the last step is vital to recognize everyone involved along the way. “It takes a village,” she said.

‘Stronger now’

James Henry, the pastor at St. James United Methodist Church in Alexandria, said he would do it again.

In 2015, St. James sold the three acres it had long owned in the sleepy Beauregard neighborhood to nonprofit developer AHC. Within the next three years, AHC had demolished the old church building and replaced it with 93 units of affordable housing dubbed St. James Plaza. The plaza opened its doors to residents in April and has filled up rapidly. John Welsh, an AHC vice president, estimated that the apartment complex will be fully occupied by early August.

As for Henry and his congregation, St. James bought and renovated a new building — much smaller than the old church — on a smaller piece of land a few hundred yards from St. James Plaza. The old church had a seating capacity of 120; the new building seats 80.

He said the decision to sell the land has had a “really positive impact” on the local community. But he acknowledged the path to sale was at times difficult.

Longtime Beauregard residents were upset at the idea that “the quiet church at the end of the street” would make way for a new housing complex, potentially heralding increased traffic and less space for parking. Some churchgoers also found the prospect distasteful.

Henry said the church probably lost 10 to 15 percent of its congregation during the move.

Now, though, St. James has begun to recover. It’s drawn an influx of new members, some of whom told Henry they joined because they appreciated the church’s efforts to live out its mission by building St. James Plaza.

“The truth is, the origins of the church were buildingless. Jesus was walking around with people, and there were no buildings — in the end it’s really about the people,” Henry said. “I think the congregation is actually stronger now.”